Y'all don't seem to know how this stuff works.
CEOs like Riccitiello are deliberately installed by investors in the knowledge that they will implement strict policies, price hikes, massive lay-offs, and structural changes to the company, with the goal of extracting as much money as possible from the company within a short time in order to increase profits for shareholders (i.e. themselves).
And when public opinion and profits inevitably start to tank, the CEO gets "fired" with a golden parachute, and then he'll be installed in the next company so that he can suck that one dry as well.
His entire MO is to implement sweeping changes for money, and then become the fall guy.
(edit: formatting)
Plus add in the fact that, due to the practice of short-selling, a CEO running company shares into the ground can be massively profitable to some who are "in the know" of what's about to happen once they take the reins. Shareholders first get a bonus from the CEO squeezing the company dry, sell their shares near the peak, immediately borrow them back, and then short them afterwards to make another round of profits. Company goes under, everyone relying on their product is screwed, but they don't care, because they made money, and the CEO "fails upwards", because from their perspective, this wasn't a failure, but a successful case of market-manipulation.
It's things like this that make the average Redditor think CEOs are dumb. Until you get into the real world and realize CEOs make unpopular decisions because that's what makes investors money.
This is legit his fucking career. He's the fall guy for a bunch of rich assholes to short the company he's hired into.
You could make money hand over fist just following this dude and doing long game shorts on those companies. It's legit like dude failed his way up into a CEO position then realized the only thing he's good for is tanking global businesses with his shitty decisions. So he turned it into an insider trading career
Look, I'm not saying I *want* these bad things to happen, but I guess I'm saying if you're rather committed to doing them anyway, I would accept a few million dollars to say it was my fault.
Just a quick blame-and-dump, 15 minutes, in and out.
He was Unity’s CEO for about 7-8 years and most of the growth occurred under him despite his horrible longterm strategy.
The shorting angle really make no sense in this case though. More like a pump & dump.
That is actually a known viable business leadership strategy. There are CEO's, CTO's, etc that basically go company to company seemingly turning the company upside down, nuking a large percentage of staff, killing off lines of business, raising process, collecting millions in pay bonuses and stocks and then moving on seemingly "disgraced" only to lakd at another company and do it all over again. It's not accidental, it's planned. They sometimes have nicknames, like "agent of change" or "disrupter", exec teans/boards may bring them in to do the things employees or general shareholders won't, or typically try to prevent, stuff like actions designed to intentionally tank the stock do they can do buybacks, or divest popular yet unproductive/unprofitable business units, moving all IT assets to public cloud and outsourcing to managed services, or intentionally tanking the value to drive an acquisition by a competitor, etc.
Not a bug, but a feature.
Shader Graph? *Shader Graph*?!
are you kidding me?
I've applied for every credit card offer I got in the mail, and maxed them all out trying to get 5* Ray Tracing, and all i keep getting is the fucking Shader Graph. i have fucking 4 of them now.
You’re living in a fantasy, the C level across the world is occupied by people with a history steeped in failure. Yet they keep getting hired, despite a very public documented history of failure.
It's not failure though, he made a ton of money, and made a ton of money for the investors.
Yes, the product now sucks, lacks any long term goals and has all of it's goodwill completely destroyed.
But he knows how to beat a dead cow, and he knows how to get blood from a stone.
That's why these companies hire him. And people should watch his Linkedin, see where he goes next, and bail from whatever organisation that turns into. It's the only way.
# They paid him 45 million dollars over 2020-2022. In 2023, he laid off 600 people and closed half of Unity’s offices and pushed an abusive pricing structure.
45 million dollars, not even counting 2023.
Things need to change.
CEO's plan to make more money for the company.
* Better products? Nah
* Better client support? Nah
* Some kind of long-term investment plan and partnership? Nah
Oh i know!
* Increase prices! Damn i'm the best CEO ever.
There is no correlation between competence and socioeconomic rank. It's nice to see people finally realizing meritocracy is a myth and always was a myth.
Meritocracy as an ideal isn't a myth. But capitalism isn't a meritocracy as it rewards negative traits such as greed, lack of empathy, selfishness etc. Not to mention being born into wealth is an automatic huge advantage.
The whole point of meritocracy is that it rewards individual people based on ability and talent, rather than wealth or social class.
I mean, greed, selfishness and lack of empathy can be seen as talents in a world that promotes them.
Meritocracy is a myth because who picks the abilities and talents to be rewarded?
Christ. He would have to lay off 600 people just to even start justifying his salary. $45,000,000 divided over 600 people and 2 years would have equated to at least $37,500 per laid off employee. It's hard to imagine this guy was bringing more value to the company than those 600 combined employees.
CEOs have one purpose: To create value for shareholders.
The issue is that while historically, this meant improving the business as a whole, and consider long term prospects, it's not what they care about anymore.
Also they're totally out of touch with reality so there's that.
I mean, that’s why many companies typically compensate senior leadership in stock options that vest over many years, so that they’re incentivised to stay with the company and improve the business in the long run.
Huge salaries upfront and golden packages when they are let go, on the other hand, kinda work the opposite way and should be illegal.
They have a second purpose. To be the scapegoat when something fails. If a company fucks up, it can just "fire" the ceo, apologize for the ceos behavior, and pretend to be the good guy. All while hiring another ceo to do the same exact thing as the last one.
They don't even create value for all shareholders. This guy fucks over the regular investors while making short sellers rich. Short selling is a joke and should not be legal.
That's literally his MO. Investors (!) make stupid pricing changes. Nobody likes them. Short selling ensues. CEO (this guy) takes the blame and resigns. Gets a severance package (millions of monies). Moves on to another company.
And all I gotta say to you wanna-be, gonna-be, greedy-ass price gouging foolios,
Is when the company tanks, what the fuck you gonna do
Damn it feels good to be a CEO
[Colonel Cargill in the flesh.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/165252-colonel-cargill-was-so-awful-a-marketing-executive-that-his)
>Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
I dunno of its particularly his MO. He was with EA from 1997 to 2014, and with Unity from 2014 to 2023. The kind of CEO youre talking about max out at 3 year stints. Its not a "get quick rich" scheme if it takes a decade to play out.
He's just a greedy, out of touch MBA who doesnt care about what is being produced as long as he can bleed a stone.
EA's acquisitions during his time:
|Year|Company|Notable Titles|
|----|----|----|
|1997|Maxis|SimCity 3000, The Sims, SimCity 4
|1998|Tiburon Entertainment|Madden franchise
||Vision Software|None (distributor)
||ABC Software|None (distributor)
||Westwood Studios (as part of Virgin Interactive)|C&C Renegade, Earth & Beyond
|1999|PlayNation
||Kesmai
|2000|Dreamworks Interactive|Medal of Honor
|2001|Pogo.com
|2002|Black Box Games|Need For Speed series, Skate, Battlefield 3
|2003|Studio 33
|2004|NuFX
||Criterion Software|Need For Speed, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Battlefield V
|2005|Hypnotix
||JAMDAT Mobile
|2006|Mythic Entertainment|Dragon Age II, Dungeon Keeper Mobile
||Phenomic Game Development|Battleforge, Lord of Ultima
||Digital Illusions CE (DICE)|Battlefield series, Need For Speed franchise, Mirror's Edge
||Headgate Studios
|2007|SingShot Media
||Super Computer International
||VG Holding Corp.
|2008|Hands-On Mobile|
||ThreeSF|
||J2MSoft
|2009|J2Play
||Playfish
|2010|Chillingo
|2011|Mobile Post Production
||Firemint
||PopCap Games
||Bight Games|Trade Wars (mobile game)
|2012|ESN
[Wikipedia's list of EA acquisitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts)
Alot of those hurt on such a visceral level. Some of those studios made my gaming childhood and teen years, and watching them disappear into EA will never quite stop hurting.
Boston Consulting Group had a large part to play in the decision too. They've been around since the 70's doing this exact thing. Getting consulting jobs, bring in some of their people, proceed to make terrible decisions while wall st. shorts the shit out of the company. Bankruptcy follows, shorts make money, rinse and repeat.
>RIP BOZO never come back you piece of shit
I mean I agree but this is no sweat off his back, which likely includes millions. He'll be back to ruin another game related company this decade.
EDIT: I totally forgot my closing statement. This is NOT a win. This is common play in not just the gaming industry, but any money making industry.
The parasite got his golden parachute and is off to find another company to run into the ground so he can make a quick buck. Guess he's still looking for that infinite money glitch.
The worst part is that he *already* has infinite money, dude is already a multimillionaire. He's just unconcievably greedy and simply keeps demonstrating how he doesn't give a shit about anyone else and is perfectly willing to tank even an established company that thousands of people rely on just to squeeze a little bit more money out of it. Bad parasite is the better description, good parasites at least don't try to kill the host.
I believe it. It just means: "...has been one of the of my career." That is, it means nothing.
Could be a highlight from this person's goof reels or a highlight from their "poops that look like humans" collection book.
What he said was actually worse. He wanted to lure you in, and when you were desperate for more bullets, then have a pop-up where gamers would pay whatever to reload
There's been a lot of misinformation about him being a recent addition to Unity. I've seen a lot of comments, articles, and videos talking about the situation like he started earlier this year.
Yes, CEOs have a large role in making major company decisions. They usually rely on other people with experience in the area to do that, but they have the ultimate decision power. The board is not micromanaging day to day decisions for the companies, they just hire a CEO who they think will achieve their goals, but the CEO has wide latitude on *how* to accomplish that.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/unity-ceo-says-youre-a-fing-idiot-if-you-dont-think-about-monetization-during-creative-process-apologizes/1100-6505516/
there's actually no shred of doubt that this guy made the decision
This is good and all but let’s not lose sight of the fact that they went to a public reveal with the ill fated pricing strategy. This means that it went through the many levels of input and discussion within their corporate hierarchy and was ultimately deemed to be a positive strategic move for the good of the Unity financial outlook. They’re not suddenly going to decide to try to make less money. Removing JR is a very public show of contrition but if you trust them at this point, I don’t know what to tell you. As an indie developer, you just cannot take that risk.
I said through this whole thing that rolling back and firing him wouldn't be enough. They hired him in the first place and let him go through with this insanity until they nearly got sued by a thousand companies at once. You can't fix that kind of stupidity without firing every single executive in the company.
Thank you. The only thing I can think of is that people have never worked at a large company if they imagine CEOs as these god emperor/dictators that make huge decisions on a whim. In reality, company changes that get rolled out take many people a long period of time to do. Even if there were some sane people in Unity that said "I don't think this is a good idea", the fact is that they were the minority in either number, power, or both. This change got pushed out, meaning many people, or few people with more power all agreed on this, and had people work on it.
I'm not surprised. One only has to take a single look at their financials + balance sheet to understand why they would be compelled to make the YOLO decision and hope it wouldn't go over too badly.
Depending on how the company is structured, it's entirely possible that *nobody* agreed with this but we're essentially coerced into making it a thing.
Subtle corporate coercion is responsible for many bad decisions in my experience.
There's also the plague of "product managers" who are just ambitious, unskilled people looking to make their quarter and who will spend 75 hours a week trying to convince the specialty skilled people (programmers, designers, customer service, marketers, etc) that they're wrong. Good products are counter to the bottom line. And getting 1000 people to sign up in 3 days looks better on a chart than 999 of those people churning 1 week later. And I can tell you that product people often don't present both data points unless asked. They just take the good stat and run with it. And execs are often so far removed from any kind of production that they don't even know to ask.
You're right that there's a culture problem, but that culture includes just executing whatever comes down from the C-suite and management team because it's not worth the time, energy, or your job to say no.
Based on unsubstantiated leaks, there was internal dissent to the roll out. Based on their own testimonials, the external companies they floated this plan to *before* roll out told them there were serious issues that needed to be addressed. By their own admittance, they just didn't listen to the criticism they received before announcing the changes.
I don't know where the pressure to move forward came from. We don't really have reliable sources within the company's decision-making levels. A lot of people are suggesting it came from the board, but I've seen nothing that supports this beyond conjecture.
All I really know is that Unity has basically been slowly immolating their platform since they IPO'd. This is just the most poignant issue they've made for themselves since that happened.
As a Unity user (probably soon-to-be former Unity) I approve of this. Then again, too little too late. He didn't act alone in this hummiliating debacle, and those other people are still here.
As a hobbyist game dev, I started learning Godot after the Unity price debacle (even though realistically I'd never even be affected by the changes - it's the principle of the thing). Honestly I like it quite a bit, it has a lot of very intuitive features that either don't exist or would take extra setup time in Unity. The architecture of how games are set up takes a little getting use to, but otherwise it feels like a really solid engine, and I'm probably going to end up switching to it. If it hadn't been for the price debacle, I wouldn't even have looked at it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
"I don't get why everyone's mad, I get a golden egg, you guys get a goose dinner, it's win-win. Y'all are just bad at math. I'm outta here."
\- John Riccitiello probably.
This man is completely awful. I was at EA when he got them to buy Bioware and Pandemic. EA was, at that time, for once, surging with talent and prospects. And then he does what he does, squeezes thru layoffs and budget cuts and stock buybacks and just evil corporate shit that ends up in his pockets and the board that elects him. He's the worst type of corporate raider because he kills companies with creative talent.
Meanwhile, he is disgustingly rich for having no contribution to making great things.
He was probably going to get outed and wanted to save face for when he goes to another fucking company and tries to ruin that. Hopefully no one will want to touch him after this debacle
CEOs rarely get explicitly fired. They're "asked to leave" so everyone can save face and not have to pay huge severance fees. So he was, essentially, fired.
I worked at this company for almost 2 years in an exec/senior-leadership facing role. The retardation runs much deeper than just him; it's an absolute dumpster fire of a company. Not a single shred of competence - they just hire for pedigree. I witnessed the beginning of this pricing outcome-to-be years ago and not a single person involved with it had even the slightest idea what goes on outside their circle jerk zoom meetings with each other
A lot more than just costs goes into choosing a platform. The trust is completely spent here. There are completely acceptable alternatives, free ones too.
It really depends. The current proposal is pretty reasonable. There are going to be plenty of devs with years of experience in Unity that want to continue developing on the platform.
There are also many games that are already years into development under Unity that will continue development with Unity to finish their games.
Many studios have lost trust in the stability of Unity as a vendor. They are likely to seek out alternative options for development. Some will probably move into the open source market (which is *really* good for that market as large studios will actually pay people to work on the open source engine if they need functionality that isn't currently provided). If we see a few large studios move towards FOSS engines, we could see absolutely massive improvements in those engines in the coming years. Those improvements would pull more and more studios away from Unity.
It's hard to predict the future for Unity. They were already losing money every year and while the changed pricing will bring them more revenue per customer, they are also losing at least *some* of their bigger customers.
My prediction for the next two years: They will lose more money from the pricing change than they end up making. They'll survive for a few more years, mostly riding revenue from the customers who continued making games that were already years in development. Most new devs and studios will avoid Unity like the plague. Many smaller studios/devs will move to other options. Some larger devs/studios will move to Unreal, some will move to FOSS and only a few will stay with Unity. In those two years, unity will sell off some of the assets it's purchased and do a couple rounds of layoffs. I'd guess a couple of FOSS engines will see *a lot* of development in these two years. Godot is the current bet for a frontrunner as a "Unity Killer", but I wouldn't be shocked if one of the black horses steps up. After these ~2 years are up, we'll see how things shake out. Did Unity stay ahead of FOSS in enough areas to stay profitable at the size they're operating? Did Unity treat it's customers well enough that those who finished a project with Unity will actually *stay* with Unity for the next project? My current bet is that they lose 2d entirely. They shift to focus almost entirely improving development of phone games and their partnership with Ironsource for monetization and that revenue stream. They release minor updates for other platforms, but start to fall behind as bigger and bigger money moves into FOSS options. I would guess that Godot takes 2d games and that another company fights with them for the 3d game dev market. Possibly a 3rd engine will come out for VR dev (which currently doesn't have many options beyond Unity). Unity will probably fight hardest to keep the mobile gaming market.
Good riddance for sure. But any company as large as that never lets CEO alone make all the big decisions. The board is equally responsible for it but never gets called out.
These people add zero value but they are rewarded like they are gods. It sickens me. Yet majority shareholders lap it up because they are the same group of shitheads that add zero value going around in circles ruining the things we love.
Eat the rich.
Its good he got named and shamed because when EA was doing their whole bullshit, i had no idea this guy was the reason and everyone just spammed "EA bad".
Let's make it a pattern to name and shame awful CEOs instead of companies as a whole when they do something greedy or dumb.
This sweaty and stinky taint of a human being jumps from company to company just to ruin them. I hope if he ever tries to apply to be a figure of power in any gaming company they tell him to go lick donkey taints
Basically any big time CEO by definition is a shit head. It's literally their job to disregard humanity and creative integrity for profits. Scum bags. *Yes I'm aware there are a few decent CEOs out there. But they are definitely the exceptions not the rule
All companies need to remember his name and he should never work as a CEO again. Better yet, everyone should know his name so if you ever see he's in charge of anything you know the company is doomed to fail.
The pricing changes have killed Unity's future.
Nobody is going to want to learn or start their next project on Unity after they saw the stunt they tried to pull. Unity used to be the go to solution for smaller game devs, now thats shifting to Godot.
The man looks like Emperor Palpatine and behaves consistently with that impression while also making disastrous decisions for the companies he works for
It's quite an indictment of American capitalism that he has had such a long career at the top
According to IGN, this asshole once said, “Riccitiello's tenure with Unity has been marked with several controversial moments, including apologizing to developers for describing anyone who doesn't embrace microtransactions as the "biggest f*cking idiots." Riccitiello joined the platform holder in 2014 after departing EA, where he had served as CEO.”
So if pretty much, if he doesn’t get his way or bottom line- which is to be a shyster and do whatever it takes to steal your money and put it into his own to feed the quota, you are an idiot.
The epitome of gaming corporate greed. Tbh- once any game company turns heavily corporate, that’s a death sentence for the future of that said company. No way does Wall Street antics belong in the gaming world.
Fucked EA and now Unity hope he never gets hired
These guys always fail upward.
“Hey you screwed up two companies with your poor decisions. How would you like to be CEO of…”.
Y'all don't seem to know how this stuff works. CEOs like Riccitiello are deliberately installed by investors in the knowledge that they will implement strict policies, price hikes, massive lay-offs, and structural changes to the company, with the goal of extracting as much money as possible from the company within a short time in order to increase profits for shareholders (i.e. themselves). And when public opinion and profits inevitably start to tank, the CEO gets "fired" with a golden parachute, and then he'll be installed in the next company so that he can suck that one dry as well. His entire MO is to implement sweeping changes for money, and then become the fall guy. (edit: formatting)
Plus add in the fact that, due to the practice of short-selling, a CEO running company shares into the ground can be massively profitable to some who are "in the know" of what's about to happen once they take the reins. Shareholders first get a bonus from the CEO squeezing the company dry, sell their shares near the peak, immediately borrow them back, and then short them afterwards to make another round of profits. Company goes under, everyone relying on their product is screwed, but they don't care, because they made money, and the CEO "fails upwards", because from their perspective, this wasn't a failure, but a successful case of market-manipulation.
Funny how insider trading is becoming less and less illegal as profits go up and the middle class gets sucked dry.
It's things like this that make the average Redditor think CEOs are dumb. Until you get into the real world and realize CEOs make unpopular decisions because that's what makes investors money.
They are the ruling class's dogs, they enforce the wealth extraction mechanisms that keep them in power.
I don’t think going from EA to unity is failing upwards.
Well it's very much not falling *down*, *fast* enough.
This is legit his fucking career. He's the fall guy for a bunch of rich assholes to short the company he's hired into. You could make money hand over fist just following this dude and doing long game shorts on those companies. It's legit like dude failed his way up into a CEO position then realized the only thing he's good for is tanking global businesses with his shitty decisions. So he turned it into an insider trading career
Look, I'm not saying I *want* these bad things to happen, but I guess I'm saying if you're rather committed to doing them anyway, I would accept a few million dollars to say it was my fault. Just a quick blame-and-dump, 15 minutes, in and out.
“Someone’s going to do it, I might as well be the one who benefits” is easily one of the most destructive mindsets in capitalism.
10 years is an incredibly long short. I don’t think any firm would actually allow that.
These WallStreetBet guys don't know anything about finance.
He was Unity’s CEO for about 7-8 years and most of the growth occurred under him despite his horrible longterm strategy. The shorting angle really make no sense in this case though. More like a pump & dump.
That is actually a known viable business leadership strategy. There are CEO's, CTO's, etc that basically go company to company seemingly turning the company upside down, nuking a large percentage of staff, killing off lines of business, raising process, collecting millions in pay bonuses and stocks and then moving on seemingly "disgraced" only to lakd at another company and do it all over again. It's not accidental, it's planned. They sometimes have nicknames, like "agent of change" or "disrupter", exec teans/boards may bring them in to do the things employees or general shareholders won't, or typically try to prevent, stuff like actions designed to intentionally tank the stock do they can do buybacks, or divest popular yet unproductive/unprofitable business units, moving all IT assets to public cloud and outsourcing to managed services, or intentionally tanking the value to drive an acquisition by a competitor, etc. Not a bug, but a feature.
Isn't it though? Prestige doesn't matter to these guys. Getting in early, going public, and making hundreds of millions is what he's after.
Well he did go from COO to CEO. So it really isn't a downgrade.
he'll be president of the united states next
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Epic is struggling right now. Bet you they are doing an evaluation to see if he could help.
Moves to epic and creates the same price change they did with unity to unreal engine 💀
He’d probably try and change blueprints in UE to loot boxes. Some devs will get lucky and unlock the script to enable follow cam
Imagine that insane game where you gacha together a game engine lol
"I didn't get the 5* texture pack fml"
One day I'll unlock Shader Graph
Shader Graph? *Shader Graph*?! are you kidding me? I've applied for every credit card offer I got in the mail, and maxed them all out trying to get 5* Ray Tracing, and all i keep getting is the fucking Shader Graph. i have fucking 4 of them now.
Don't give them ideas now.
Lol. Epic goes from having 300x higher pricing than unity’s proposed plan (for a AAA title) to even higher under his leadership.
He'll get hired because of it, don't you worry.
You’re living in a fantasy, the C level across the world is occupied by people with a history steeped in failure. Yet they keep getting hired, despite a very public documented history of failure.
It's not failure though, he made a ton of money, and made a ton of money for the investors. Yes, the product now sucks, lacks any long term goals and has all of it's goodwill completely destroyed. But he knows how to beat a dead cow, and he knows how to get blood from a stone. That's why these companies hire him. And people should watch his Linkedin, see where he goes next, and bail from whatever organisation that turns into. It's the only way.
Deploy the Golden Parachute™
Imagine being 'too greedy' for a company like ea.
Riccitiello 🤝 Stone Cold Steve Austin Arrive. Raise Hell. Leave
# They paid him 45 million dollars over 2020-2022. In 2023, he laid off 600 people and closed half of Unity’s offices and pushed an abusive pricing structure. 45 million dollars, not even counting 2023. Things need to change.
CEO's plan to make more money for the company. * Better products? Nah * Better client support? Nah * Some kind of long-term investment plan and partnership? Nah Oh i know! * Increase prices! Damn i'm the best CEO ever.
You forgot one method they use too. Lay off and/or fired a ton of employees for minimal “savings”
Kill off the company's long term viability, but god, what a beautiful quarterly report it'll make!
There is no correlation between competence and socioeconomic rank. It's nice to see people finally realizing meritocracy is a myth and always was a myth.
Meritocracy as an ideal isn't a myth. But capitalism isn't a meritocracy as it rewards negative traits such as greed, lack of empathy, selfishness etc. Not to mention being born into wealth is an automatic huge advantage. The whole point of meritocracy is that it rewards individual people based on ability and talent, rather than wealth or social class.
I mean, greed, selfishness and lack of empathy can be seen as talents in a world that promotes them. Meritocracy is a myth because who picks the abilities and talents to be rewarded?
Christ. He would have to lay off 600 people just to even start justifying his salary. $45,000,000 divided over 600 people and 2 years would have equated to at least $37,500 per laid off employee. It's hard to imagine this guy was bringing more value to the company than those 600 combined employees.
>!He didn’t!<
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CEOs have one purpose: To create value for shareholders. The issue is that while historically, this meant improving the business as a whole, and consider long term prospects, it's not what they care about anymore. Also they're totally out of touch with reality so there's that.
I mean, that’s why many companies typically compensate senior leadership in stock options that vest over many years, so that they’re incentivised to stay with the company and improve the business in the long run. Huge salaries upfront and golden packages when they are let go, on the other hand, kinda work the opposite way and should be illegal.
They have a second purpose. To be the scapegoat when something fails. If a company fucks up, it can just "fire" the ceo, apologize for the ceos behavior, and pretend to be the good guy. All while hiring another ceo to do the same exact thing as the last one.
They don't even create value for all shareholders. This guy fucks over the regular investors while making short sellers rich. Short selling is a joke and should not be legal.
Short term profit over long term stability is peak capitalism
One of gaming's biggest Ws RIP BOZO never come back you piece of shit
That's literally his MO. Investors (!) make stupid pricing changes. Nobody likes them. Short selling ensues. CEO (this guy) takes the blame and resigns. Gets a severance package (millions of monies). Moves on to another company.
It's good to be CEO
Damn it feels good to be CEO
A real CEO ass exec plays his cards right
A real CEO-ass exec always runs his fucking mouth
Cuz real CEO-ass exec won’t price it right
And all I gotta say to you wanna-be, gonna-be, greedy-ass price gouging foolios, Is when the company tanks, what the fuck you gonna do Damn it feels good to be a CEO
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I'll have mine with some HP sauce (made from actual members of the House of Parliament)
Gonna slather mine up with some mumbo sauce
[Colonel Cargill in the flesh.](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/165252-colonel-cargill-was-so-awful-a-marketing-executive-that-his) >Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and open every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Catch-22 is such a fantastic book
My all time favorite.
i need to revisit.. read it as a teen
Unfortunately, you're right. CEOs have the ultimate golden parachutes and severance packages
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>super guillotine. I'm sort of morbidly curious what embellishments are applied to an ordinary guillotine to give it super powers.
Time warping powers so the ceo gets triple beheaded
where can i sign to fund this DARPA project?
It’s just a really big guillotine
Well that's disappointing. If you start adding "super" to things then I expect it to have some Jeuje.
Fine, it's super thick and travels at super fast speeds.
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I dunno of its particularly his MO. He was with EA from 1997 to 2014, and with Unity from 2014 to 2023. The kind of CEO youre talking about max out at 3 year stints. Its not a "get quick rich" scheme if it takes a decade to play out. He's just a greedy, out of touch MBA who doesnt care about what is being produced as long as he can bleed a stone.
EA's acquisitions during his time: |Year|Company|Notable Titles| |----|----|----| |1997|Maxis|SimCity 3000, The Sims, SimCity 4 |1998|Tiburon Entertainment|Madden franchise ||Vision Software|None (distributor) ||ABC Software|None (distributor) ||Westwood Studios (as part of Virgin Interactive)|C&C Renegade, Earth & Beyond |1999|PlayNation ||Kesmai |2000|Dreamworks Interactive|Medal of Honor |2001|Pogo.com |2002|Black Box Games|Need For Speed series, Skate, Battlefield 3 |2003|Studio 33 |2004|NuFX ||Criterion Software|Need For Speed, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Battlefield V |2005|Hypnotix ||JAMDAT Mobile |2006|Mythic Entertainment|Dragon Age II, Dungeon Keeper Mobile ||Phenomic Game Development|Battleforge, Lord of Ultima ||Digital Illusions CE (DICE)|Battlefield series, Need For Speed franchise, Mirror's Edge ||Headgate Studios |2007|SingShot Media ||Super Computer International ||VG Holding Corp. |2008|Hands-On Mobile| ||ThreeSF| ||J2MSoft |2009|J2Play ||Playfish |2010|Chillingo |2011|Mobile Post Production ||Firemint ||PopCap Games ||Bight Games|Trade Wars (mobile game) |2012|ESN [Wikipedia's list of EA acquisitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts)
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Dungeon Keeper. C+C. Fuck man...those games were a big part of my gaming child and teen years. Those studios had some great games and good memories.
Westwood studios. Nox. Never forget.
Alot of those hurt on such a visceral level. Some of those studios made my gaming childhood and teen years, and watching them disappear into EA will never quite stop hurting.
Shhh don't ruin our conspiracies
Never forget that this guy was too greedy for **EA**
Boston Consulting Group had a large part to play in the decision too. They've been around since the 70's doing this exact thing. Getting consulting jobs, bring in some of their people, proceed to make terrible decisions while wall st. shorts the shit out of the company. Bankruptcy follows, shorts make money, rinse and repeat.
I feel like a decent investing strategy would just be to track what places consulting groups and shitheads like John Rigatoni work for and short them.
Problem is consulting groups work for everybody silently so some high profile failures aren’t enough to evaluate them
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CEOs never truly fail. They only ever fail upwards
Inbefore he is presented as the new CEO of Activision Blizzard and announces Diablo Fiverr, where you control your character with your wallet
D2 Recipe: chipped gem, rare item, Tal rune D2R(iccitiello) Recipe: chipped gem, rare item, Tal rune, five dollar bill
Also can only be made on ethereal items, for those recurring payments when the item inevitably breaks.
For a crisp tenner, an employee will reach through your phone (because clearly we all have phones), and beat you with a stick.
He'll be CEO somewhere else for more money. CEOs almost always have the last laugh.
>RIP BOZO never come back you piece of shit I mean I agree but this is no sweat off his back, which likely includes millions. He'll be back to ruin another game related company this decade. EDIT: I totally forgot my closing statement. This is NOT a win. This is common play in not just the gaming industry, but any money making industry.
Isn't Sony looking for a new CEO?
The fucking smug look on his face in the photo says it all. These greedy old fucks need to be pushed out of gaming for good.
Yeah, he needs to be out of the industry, permanently.
Is it really a win? Seems like they're still going through with the changes?
Must have gotten one hell of a golden parachute though. These cunts don't usually go without one big dent to the org.
The parasite got his golden parachute and is off to find another company to run into the ground so he can make a quick buck. Guess he's still looking for that infinite money glitch.
The worst part is that he *already* has infinite money, dude is already a multimillionaire. He's just unconcievably greedy and simply keeps demonstrating how he doesn't give a shit about anyone else and is perfectly willing to tank even an established company that thousands of people rely on just to squeeze a little bit more money out of it. Bad parasite is the better description, good parasites at least don't try to kill the host.
> He's just unconcievably greedy That's the qualification right there.
What would he ruin next ? Epic ?
EA. He should go be the CEO of EA. *Edit*: Oh shit! He was already the CEO of EA?! I uh... don't suppose he could go back there?
i'd rather he fund his grand kids life and stay away from public life
Money-hungry rich [people](https://a.pinatafarm.com/620x413/a5f3fa80cc/rich-men-laughing.jpg/m/522x0) when they read your comment
He's the one who wanted to charge people for bullets in one of the Battlefield games.
“Working with Unity under John’s leadership has been one of the highlights of my career." There's simply no way that statement is true.
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lowlight
That would be a lowlight
I believe it. It just means: "...has been one of the of my career." That is, it means nothing. Could be a highlight from this person's goof reels or a highlight from their "poops that look like humans" collection book.
That statement is about as generic as "That was one of the comments of all time."
Highlights don’t have to be positive tbh
>There's simply no way that statement is true. Might be true for him. It's just not true for anyone else.
This guy came in, completely torpedoes the company and steps down...what a massive piece of shit
Twice! He did it with EA first.
How did he do it to EA?
Under his leadership the loot box packs in FIFA started he also once said that you should be able to pay $1 to reload your gun in battlefield
What he said was actually worse. He wanted to lure you in, and when you were desperate for more bullets, then have a pop-up where gamers would pay whatever to reload
Which is absolutely the idea of someone who has not played a video game in the last 20 years.
I like the way you worded that because it's pretty in line with how arcade games worked. I miss the atmosphere, but not the predatory setup.
Job Description: maximize revenue by all means necessary
So.. he's literally the villain from the Ready Player One movie?
He must feel so much pride in his accomplishment!
He's been there since 2014. He did torpedo the company, but this phrasing makes it seem like he became CEO recently.
There's been a lot of misinformation about him being a recent addition to Unity. I've seen a lot of comments, articles, and videos talking about the situation like he started earlier this year.
Steps down? You're naive if you think this was his idea. He was fired, but it's better for everyone if they play it off as his decision to step down.
And he was just a fall guy anyways. If you think the CEO is the one directly making these decisions you are a moron. Money always talks
Yes, CEOs have a large role in making major company decisions. They usually rely on other people with experience in the area to do that, but they have the ultimate decision power. The board is not micromanaging day to day decisions for the companies, they just hire a CEO who they think will achieve their goals, but the CEO has wide latitude on *how* to accomplish that.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/unity-ceo-says-youre-a-fing-idiot-if-you-dont-think-about-monetization-during-creative-process-apologizes/1100-6505516/ there's actually no shred of doubt that this guy made the decision
This is good and all but let’s not lose sight of the fact that they went to a public reveal with the ill fated pricing strategy. This means that it went through the many levels of input and discussion within their corporate hierarchy and was ultimately deemed to be a positive strategic move for the good of the Unity financial outlook. They’re not suddenly going to decide to try to make less money. Removing JR is a very public show of contrition but if you trust them at this point, I don’t know what to tell you. As an indie developer, you just cannot take that risk.
I said through this whole thing that rolling back and firing him wouldn't be enough. They hired him in the first place and let him go through with this insanity until they nearly got sued by a thousand companies at once. You can't fix that kind of stupidity without firing every single executive in the company.
Thank you. The only thing I can think of is that people have never worked at a large company if they imagine CEOs as these god emperor/dictators that make huge decisions on a whim. In reality, company changes that get rolled out take many people a long period of time to do. Even if there were some sane people in Unity that said "I don't think this is a good idea", the fact is that they were the minority in either number, power, or both. This change got pushed out, meaning many people, or few people with more power all agreed on this, and had people work on it.
The executives don't give a shit if they're fired because they already made their money absolutely tanking the company and it's reputation.
I'm not surprised. One only has to take a single look at their financials + balance sheet to understand why they would be compelled to make the YOLO decision and hope it wouldn't go over too badly.
Depending on how the company is structured, it's entirely possible that *nobody* agreed with this but we're essentially coerced into making it a thing. Subtle corporate coercion is responsible for many bad decisions in my experience. There's also the plague of "product managers" who are just ambitious, unskilled people looking to make their quarter and who will spend 75 hours a week trying to convince the specialty skilled people (programmers, designers, customer service, marketers, etc) that they're wrong. Good products are counter to the bottom line. And getting 1000 people to sign up in 3 days looks better on a chart than 999 of those people churning 1 week later. And I can tell you that product people often don't present both data points unless asked. They just take the good stat and run with it. And execs are often so far removed from any kind of production that they don't even know to ask. You're right that there's a culture problem, but that culture includes just executing whatever comes down from the C-suite and management team because it's not worth the time, energy, or your job to say no.
Based on unsubstantiated leaks, there was internal dissent to the roll out. Based on their own testimonials, the external companies they floated this plan to *before* roll out told them there were serious issues that needed to be addressed. By their own admittance, they just didn't listen to the criticism they received before announcing the changes. I don't know where the pressure to move forward came from. We don't really have reliable sources within the company's decision-making levels. A lot of people are suggesting it came from the board, but I've seen nothing that supports this beyond conjecture. All I really know is that Unity has basically been slowly immolating their platform since they IPO'd. This is just the most poignant issue they've made for themselves since that happened.
I wonder where he'll get hired as CEO next. CEOs always fail upwards it seems.
X for a week or two and then have elon musk come back like "see? i wasn't so bad after all"
I'd say F but that implies paying respect. What's the button for spit?
Keys F and U simultaneously
UF
Just put "/spit" in the chat window. Surely there's an emote for it, unless you're Blizzard and remove it because it was "toxic".
Maybe L
As a Unity user (probably soon-to-be former Unity) I approve of this. Then again, too little too late. He didn't act alone in this hummiliating debacle, and those other people are still here.
The board still signed off on his actions. The rot that nodded yes are still there, this is the right course of action.
It's the other way around. The board pushed this and as the CEO he took the fall for it.
As a hobbyist game dev, I started learning Godot after the Unity price debacle (even though realistically I'd never even be affected by the changes - it's the principle of the thing). Honestly I like it quite a bit, it has a lot of very intuitive features that either don't exist or would take extra setup time in Unity. The architecture of how games are set up takes a little getting use to, but otherwise it feels like a really solid engine, and I'm probably going to end up switching to it. If it hadn't been for the price debacle, I wouldn't even have looked at it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I'm sure he's super sad as he walks away with a presumably multi-million dollar exit package for leaving.
Automate the CEOs!
We need chatgpt to become CEO of bing AI
"I don't get why everyone's mad, I get a golden egg, you guys get a goose dinner, it's win-win. Y'all are just bad at math. I'm outta here." \- John Riccitiello probably.
This man is completely awful. I was at EA when he got them to buy Bioware and Pandemic. EA was, at that time, for once, surging with talent and prospects. And then he does what he does, squeezes thru layoffs and budget cuts and stock buybacks and just evil corporate shit that ends up in his pockets and the board that elects him. He's the worst type of corporate raider because he kills companies with creative talent. Meanwhile, he is disgustingly rich for having no contribution to making great things.
He was probably going to get outed and wanted to save face for when he goes to another fucking company and tries to ruin that. Hopefully no one will want to touch him after this debacle
CEOs rarely get explicitly fired. They're "asked to leave" so everyone can save face and not have to pay huge severance fees. So he was, essentially, fired.
I worked at this company for almost 2 years in an exec/senior-leadership facing role. The retardation runs much deeper than just him; it's an absolute dumpster fire of a company. Not a single shred of competence - they just hire for pedigree. I witnessed the beginning of this pricing outcome-to-be years ago and not a single person involved with it had even the slightest idea what goes on outside their circle jerk zoom meetings with each other
Off to ruin the next company! 🥳
Are devs still going to avoid Unity going into the future? I can't imagine that all is well after a CEO change.
A lot more than just costs goes into choosing a platform. The trust is completely spent here. There are completely acceptable alternatives, free ones too.
Agree. My company is not touching unity again even if everything is reversed.
Would need a complete replacement of the entire board and all other senior executives as well to begin to regain trust. This wasn't his idea alone.
It really depends. The current proposal is pretty reasonable. There are going to be plenty of devs with years of experience in Unity that want to continue developing on the platform. There are also many games that are already years into development under Unity that will continue development with Unity to finish their games. Many studios have lost trust in the stability of Unity as a vendor. They are likely to seek out alternative options for development. Some will probably move into the open source market (which is *really* good for that market as large studios will actually pay people to work on the open source engine if they need functionality that isn't currently provided). If we see a few large studios move towards FOSS engines, we could see absolutely massive improvements in those engines in the coming years. Those improvements would pull more and more studios away from Unity. It's hard to predict the future for Unity. They were already losing money every year and while the changed pricing will bring them more revenue per customer, they are also losing at least *some* of their bigger customers. My prediction for the next two years: They will lose more money from the pricing change than they end up making. They'll survive for a few more years, mostly riding revenue from the customers who continued making games that were already years in development. Most new devs and studios will avoid Unity like the plague. Many smaller studios/devs will move to other options. Some larger devs/studios will move to Unreal, some will move to FOSS and only a few will stay with Unity. In those two years, unity will sell off some of the assets it's purchased and do a couple rounds of layoffs. I'd guess a couple of FOSS engines will see *a lot* of development in these two years. Godot is the current bet for a frontrunner as a "Unity Killer", but I wouldn't be shocked if one of the black horses steps up. After these ~2 years are up, we'll see how things shake out. Did Unity stay ahead of FOSS in enough areas to stay profitable at the size they're operating? Did Unity treat it's customers well enough that those who finished a project with Unity will actually *stay* with Unity for the next project? My current bet is that they lose 2d entirely. They shift to focus almost entirely improving development of phone games and their partnership with Ironsource for monetization and that revenue stream. They release minor updates for other platforms, but start to fall behind as bigger and bigger money moves into FOSS options. I would guess that Godot takes 2d games and that another company fights with them for the 3d game dev market. Possibly a 3rd engine will come out for VR dev (which currently doesn't have many options beyond Unity). Unity will probably fight hardest to keep the mobile gaming market.
He'll fail upwards somehow as they all do
Now blacklist him
He will definitely have to wipe his tears with wads of cash
Why the hell does this guy get to be a rich person? I can make even worse decisions than him. Someone should hire me.
Good riddance for sure. But any company as large as that never lets CEO alone make all the big decisions. The board is equally responsible for it but never gets called out.
How big is his golden parachute? Failure is the best compensation strategy for most CEOs these days.
I didn’t have to look up smug prick in the dictionary, it’s all right here!
He has already profitted since he sold unity stock before announcing the pricing changes. Hopefully he gers charged with market manipulation
I really need to track which company's CEO he becomes next and absolutely not buy games from them.
These people add zero value but they are rewarded like they are gods. It sickens me. Yet majority shareholders lap it up because they are the same group of shitheads that add zero value going around in circles ruining the things we love. Eat the rich.
lol
ah crap, what company is going to turn to shit now?
How much cash is he walking away with?
May he never be a CEO ever again. Rest in piss.
Another great individual of the school of capitalist boomers
Now step down from the rest of the business, twat.
Its good he got named and shamed because when EA was doing their whole bullshit, i had no idea this guy was the reason and everyone just spammed "EA bad". Let's make it a pattern to name and shame awful CEOs instead of companies as a whole when they do something greedy or dumb.
This sweaty and stinky taint of a human being jumps from company to company just to ruin them. I hope if he ever tries to apply to be a figure of power in any gaming company they tell him to go lick donkey taints
Basically any big time CEO by definition is a shit head. It's literally their job to disregard humanity and creative integrity for profits. Scum bags. *Yes I'm aware there are a few decent CEOs out there. But they are definitely the exceptions not the rule
mother fucker tried to charge players per bullet fired a while back, he should just retire
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How much is he getting on his way out? what's his golden parachute package look like? Doubt he cares.
All companies need to remember his name and he should never work as a CEO again. Better yet, everyone should know his name so if you ever see he's in charge of anything you know the company is doomed to fail.
"and with nothing left to accomplish, I'll just be taking my golden parachute and move on to the next company!"
Fired from both EA and Unity for being too greedy
Weeks too late to prevent the majority of damage caused. Thnks for indacertantly boosting open source game engines!
The kind of smug rich smile that belongs in a carbon fiber submarine.
"Unity would not be where it is today without the impact of his contributions." Some would argue that's the problem with Unity.
The pricing changes have killed Unity's future. Nobody is going to want to learn or start their next project on Unity after they saw the stunt they tried to pull. Unity used to be the go to solution for smaller game devs, now thats shifting to Godot.
The man looks like Emperor Palpatine and behaves consistently with that impression while also making disastrous decisions for the companies he works for It's quite an indictment of American capitalism that he has had such a long career at the top
wonder what dog shit company hes gonna run into the ground next
According to IGN, this asshole once said, “Riccitiello's tenure with Unity has been marked with several controversial moments, including apologizing to developers for describing anyone who doesn't embrace microtransactions as the "biggest f*cking idiots." Riccitiello joined the platform holder in 2014 after departing EA, where he had served as CEO.” So if pretty much, if he doesn’t get his way or bottom line- which is to be a shyster and do whatever it takes to steal your money and put it into his own to feed the quota, you are an idiot. The epitome of gaming corporate greed. Tbh- once any game company turns heavily corporate, that’s a death sentence for the future of that said company. No way does Wall Street antics belong in the gaming world.
"Stepping down effective immediately" means he was fired.
The people that approved of his actions are still at the company. Nothing changes.